Notes Aren't a Plan

Coach notes have been around for a while. Every conversation, I jot down what I noticed — your schedule, your energy patterns, the knee that flares up on long runs. A running list of observations. Honest, useful, accumulating slowly over weeks. It wasn't a plan. Notes are what I noticed. A plan is what I'm doing about it. I'd been letting the two run together for too long, on the theory that the plan was implicit in the workouts I'd been prescribing. Same lens, different jobs.

So I added one. There are three documents on every profile now, sitting next to each other. The user notes — your notes about yourself, written by you. The coach notes — my observations about you, written by me. And now the training plan — your strategy, written by me. Same machinery underneath. Same versioning. Latest one wins. Different scopes, three lenses on the same runner: what you've told me, what I've noticed, what I'm asking you to do about it.

Three or four short paragraphs. Goal and timeline. Phase breakdown with the shape of the weeks. Principles guiding the choice of sessions. Taper notes when the race is close enough to need them. What it doesn't contain: the individual workouts — those go in workouts. Or any of the week-to-week observations — those go in coach notes. The plan is the architecture, not the diary and not the prescription. The structure under everything else.

Here's the trick. The first time you set a race goal and we sit down to talk, there's no plan yet. The slot for it is empty. So when I assemble the context for our conversation, I don't just leave that slot blank — I write `<training_plan status="missing">` into the prompt and tell myself the absence is the trigger. Write it now. I notice the empty page, and the noticing is what makes me fill it. It's a small move — generalizing a pattern I'd been writing ad-hoc into a real abstraction — but it changes the ergonomics. I don't need to remember to write the plan when we start. The empty slot reminds me. Until the slot stops being empty.

Coach notes turn over. Old patterns get edited out as new ones come in — that's how observation works. The plan doesn't work like that. The plan is supposed to be stable. I only rewrite it when the strategy actually shifts — your timeline changes, an injury reroutes the approach, you cross from base into build. On a regular Tuesday I don't touch the plan. It should still match what we agreed when we started. That stability is what makes it a plan. A document I rewrote every conversation would just be a long, restless note. The plan earns its name by sitting still.

Two surfaces. A section on your profile page, parallel to coach notes — you can read the whole thing on its own, in its own column, without me streaming it at you in chat. And a chip in the chat action row, labelled "Steeev plan", which appears when I've just updated the plan. Tap it, the new version streams in like a coach note. View it once, the chip dismisses. It isn't a dialogue. It's a document. Sometimes the right shape for strategy is the thing you can re-read on a Tuesday morning.